HP ElitePad 900 G1 Pro Reviews

The ElitePad 900 is a corporate tablet in the purest sense: It looks unobtrusive, it has good battery life, and it can handle everyday tasks. HP also offers a good number of perks to make IT people's lives easier, including a special tool that lets you crack the case to replace or repair internal components, and a collection of high-end asset-management and deployment tools. But the ElitePad 900 lacks the processing power and memory to tackle complex tasks, and it provides very limited storage capacity.

It doesn't really make sense to think of the HP ElitePad as a budget tablet. While the base model without any add-ons is competitively priced, the real strength of this device lies in its flexibility. With a cornucopia of accessories available, it is able to adapt to fit a wide variety of needs. That's not to say that it is without fault. The tablet does offer performance levels reminiscent of other budget tablets, and regardless of how many add-ons users buy the specs will remain the same. For basic computing functions the Intel Atom processor will hold up, but users looking for more will find the device wanting. However, with its strong durable build quality and excellent battery life the HP ElitePad shouldn't be overlooked. Users who want an affordable tablet with the ability to adapt via numerous optional accessories should not overlook it. Just be ready to spend a bit more than most budget tablets to get the most out of this device.

On paper, the ElitePad 900 has almost everything we'd expect from a business tablet: pen support, security features like TPM and a dock with Ethernet and extra ports. It's offered with a wider-than-usual range of accessories, including useful goodies like a second battery and keyboard case. Not to mention, it's one of the best-looking tablets we've ever seen, and that's definitely not something we demand from enterprise tech. In fact, our review was going swimmingly -- that is, until it came time to test the performance. Even compared to other Atom tablets, which aren't exactly powerhouses either, the ElitePad feels sluggish. Its runtime is lacking too; you could spring for that $99 spare battery, of course, but it's going to make the tablet much, much heavier than 1.38 pounds. Ditto for ports: unless you snap on one of those SmartJackets or plug the tablet into the docking station, you'll have to make do with very few I/O options. Meanwhile, there are other business tablets that either cost less (the Dell Latitude 10 comes to mind) or that deliver longer battery life (that'd be the ThinkPad Tablet 2). All that said, the ElitePad is still a solid tablet in many ways, but it's only at its best when you splurge on the extras.

With the ElitePad 900, HP is making a better case than I expected for the business-grade, Atom-powered Windows 8 tablet. Using roughly the same form factor as the HP Envy X2 (sans the keyboard dock), the ElitePad has been designed from the inside out to be a business-fleet tool. Some of the design choices HP made to accomplish this are obvious. Others you'll only encounter if you're an IT manager, but these are even more striking. First, the skinny on the tablet itself: The 10.1-inch, 1,200-by-800 display sports a 16:10 aspect ratio, which puts it close to the dimensions of a printed page. Business-class users will appreciate this for the sake of representing legal-sized documents accurately when the screen is in portrait mode. The low-wattage Atom processor means long battery life, for which HP claims 10 hours. I got seven and a half hours in my Netflix rundown test.